More often than not, the best way to admire a hand-built frame is in the raw state — before it’s painted. That’s certainly true of the frames made by Tom Warmerdam, whose lugs are some of the largest in the business and… entirely made from scratch.

With only a handful of manufacturers supplying the frame building industry with lugs, there’s little to tell one unpainted lugged steel frame from another — apart from the quality of finishing. Tom Warmerdam of Southampton’s Demon Frameworks sought to break away from that conformity by creating two of his own lug designs: ‘The Manhattan’ and…